Good interview with Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), on the true nature of why and how corporations wield their power over our civic society and what can be done about it. It also references CELDF’s ‘Democracy Schools’, which I have attended on a number of occasions and highly recommend to anyone interested in deepening their understanding of what we are up against and how to better aim their efforts towards changing our current political situation through changing the structure of law.

Thomas Linzey thinks of himself as more than just a lawyer. A co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), Linzey is a practicing attorney, committed to the idea that change happens at the grassroots. Much of his activism occurs through CELDF’s “Democracy Schools,” an innovative curriculum that encourages people to go beyond the single issue they are working on to think of their struggle as part of a larger fight against corporate power. The schools prompt citizens to question basic assumptions behind our legal system. Linzey and his colleagues encourage communities to create local constitutions, or “home-rule charters,” enumerating the rights of local citizens and backing up those rights with enforceable laws.

Q: Can you tell us about “democracy”? It’s a word used by everyone and can mean so many things.

Thomas Linzey: Well, I don’t think we have ever had a democracy in this country. I think it’s a myth that majorities have ever been able to decide what happens to their communities and their lives.

It goes back to the American Revolution when we jettisoned the king, but we didn’t jettison the English structure of law. That structure of law developed at the same time England was developing into a global cultural empire. And the folks that wrote the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the DNA or hardwiring for this country, in essence worshiped English common law. We got rid of the King but we didn’t get rid of an English structure of law that placed property and commerce over the rights of communities and nature.

Amazing as it might sound, a community that may want to stop toxic waste, or stop toxic sludge from coming in, or stop a big corporate hog factory farm from coming into the community, not only runs up against the corporations and the state regulatory agencies, it runs up against the Constitution.

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Q: Many people in this country don’t understand that corporations have personhood rights. Why does this come as such a surprise to some people?

TL: That’s a very good question. People only begin to peel back the layers of the legal opinions under which they are governed when they have something threaten them personally. One or our most able organizers — a woman named Jennifer England — is from southwestern Virginia. She has seven children. And she’s an evangelical Christian. There were plans to dump sludge right next to her house. And it was that imminent threat to her kids, to her land, to her family, to her home, that drove Jennifer to start questioning how this entire structure of law is set up.

She asked, “Why can’t we just have a law that says ‘no sludge can be spread in this community’?” So we had a conversation with her, and we told her that you can’t do that, because it would be illegal. It’s unconstitutional to ban something at the community level that the state has permitted, because it violates the corporation’s constitutional rights. So the question is, as Jennifer asked, “Why?” When you explain to people like Jennifer that corporations are persons, it just doesn’t make any sense to them.

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What this work is about is knitting together those communities who are finally learning that they are always on the losing end of the stick, that the regulatory agencies are not a remedy, that they can’t turn to their state legislature or their courts for a remedy because those courts are carrying out laws that are written by the corporations in the first place.

Read the complete interview from Alternet